Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Koch Brothers use their financial empire to back all sorts of political activities harmful to U.S. citizens and in fact to the rest of the world. Some of the things that they actively push or that their money supports include:

●Attempts to destroy Medicare and to limit access to affordable health care for U.S. citizens.
●Attempts to lower and eliminate clean air standards and to eliminate other policies designed to protect people and the environment from the effects of oil spills and pollution.
●Attempts to eliminate rights for U.S. workers, to end the ability of U.S. citizens to collectively bargain for their contracts, and to destroy union rights and unions themselves.
●Political indoctrination of their employees in Koch Brothers’ political interests, and pressure, through group meetings and constant work place announcements, to make their employees vote for the candidates that the Koch Brothers support.
●Huge financial support for political candidates whose goals are to eliminate all government checks on corporate power and to support all the practices listed above.

However, you can take one small step towards reducing their damaging influence on the world. Don’t buy Koch Brothers products, and recommend to others not to buy them also.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

My first two Southern California readings featuring The Quarry and The Lot are coming up a few weeks from now. I won’t be reading only from the book, most likely, although most of the reading will certainly feature the book, which I’ve never read in public before. If you’re nearby, I’d love to see you there.

Saturday, May 7
7 p.m.
The evening will also feature literature in performance by India Radfar and Simone Forti
Agitprop Gallery
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's
Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry and The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening.

Mark Wallace's The Quarry and The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others. Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once.
--Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses

For those interested in potentially reviewing the book, review copies are available. To obtain a review copy, please leave an e-mail address and mailing address here in the blog comments, or drop me a note at markwallace1322@yahoo.com

Many thanks to all the people who helped me with the many parts of the process of the book, both in its writing and its publication. Any book is truly a group endeavor, and I couldn't have finished it and brought it into the world without a great deal of help from others.